Quote:
Originally Posted by Hatuey  Now imagine hundreds of millions of novice users using an OS for which support is mainly online. That's why Linux is pretty much useless to not only the large majority of people who use computers but also for people who use them for work and such.
Which is why Linux is pretty much useless. |
This topic isn't about high end, it's about little stuff, but I do think it looks like you won the argument on the high end stuff. Rich...
If you are living in a grass hut in Africa or you are a poor beach bum like me, and find an old computer not worth more than 5 bucks at a thrift store, like a coke bottle dropped from the gods, running windows 98, the newest version of PcLinuxOS would seem to run better than Windows 98.
You made a good point about not having the Internet. With no online help what comes on some liveCD's may not contain enough information to be a super user, to even install a new program should the gods also drop some tar balls...
Windows is easy when it comes to installing a program, just click on the setup.exe file, it is self explanatory, Linux is super hard.
Installing Software on Linux
One thing I have discovered is Abiword (PcLinuxOs) crashes frequently. I suspect it has to do with website links, but just plain text seems fine as I dumped several pages into it. I haven't had a word processor crash so often since the 8086 with the monochrome monitor running Wordstar, and typing too fast is no longer a problem with me. Scrolling several pages is a problem, too Herky Jerky, so I will just have to stick with the text editors.
Trying out another program now, that keeps trying to finish words for me like the old shareware mindreader program from the DOS days (mindreader popped up some asci windows). I do not need that irritation without asking for it.
I can't hotsync or use IrDA pod to sync my Alphasmart Dana. Someone I think is working on the latter, and hopefully it will get done for the distribution I am using.
Even with the problems I feel Linux is not useless for a poor man. Unless the gods drop the restore disks with the junk computer, Linux is NOT USELESS!